BACKGROUND Previous research shows evidence of an interrelation between family formation and the migration of immigrants in Europe. Less research has been conducted on the fertility and family behavior of the descendants of immigrants. OBJECTIVES Our study provides analyses of the childbearing behavior of daughters of immigrants in Sweden. The context is that of a country with near-replacement-level fertility and social policies oriented towards social equality. METHODS The study is based on register data covering 1998-2012, which allows for highly detailed analyses of the childbearing behavior of 20 country origin groups of second-generation women. By means of event history techniques, we analyze the transition to any first, second, and third births. RESULTS Our analyses show that most groups of descendants of immigrants have lower fertility than those with a full Swedish background. The risk of having a first child is particularly depressed, and the risk of having a second child is also lower for daughters of immigrants than for women with two Swedish-born parents. In contrast, many groups of immigrant-descendant two-child mothers display elevated third-birth risks. CONCLUSIONS Our findings demonstrate the necessity to account for parity-specific differences in fertility when studying the fertility of descendants of migrants.

BACKGROUND Immigrants and their second-generation descendants make up more than a quarter of the current Swedish population. Their nuptiality patterns can be viewed as crucial indicators of their integration into Swedish society. OBJECTIVES This study provides data on levels of and patterns in marriage formation, divorce, and re-marriage of people in Sweden, by country of origin. METHODS The study is based on analyses of longitudinal register data that cover all residents born in 1951 and later who ever lived in Sweden during 1983-2007. Kaplan-Meier survivor functions demonstrate levels in nuptiality; multivariate event-history analyses demonstrate relative risks of marriage formation and divorce, by country group of origin. RESULTS We find evidence of variation among immigrant groups and between migrants and Swedish-born people in marriage and divorce patterns. A few groups of migrants have relatively high churning rates in family dynamics, with high levels of marriage formation, divorce, and re-marriage. CONCLUSIONS Many factors relate to the nuptiality behavior of immigrants in Sweden. Differences in family systems seem to have some influence on behavior in the contemporary Swedish context. Other factors relate to the migration process itself and to the selectivity of migrants to Sweden.

This study investigates the role of female labor-market attachment and earnings in childbearing progressions in two very different European contexts. By applying event history techniques to German and Danish register data during 1981-2001, we demonstrate how female earnings relate to first, second and third birth propensities. Our study shows that female earnings are positively associated with first birth fertility in Denmark, while this is not the case in West Germany. We interpret our findings based on the fact that Danish social context and policy encourage women to establish themselves in the labor market before becoming a mother, while the German institutional context during the 1980s and 1990s was not geared towards encouraging maternal employment. For higher order births, the results are less clear-cut. For Denmark we find a slightly positive correlation between female earnings and second birth fertility, while the association is somewhat negative for third order births. In Germany, women tend to exit the labor market when becoming a mother. Non-employed mothers have elevated second and, in particular, third birth rates. For the group of mothers that are employed, we only find a weak association between their earnings and higher order fertility.

Studies that have investigated the role of unemployment in childbearing decisions have often shown no or only barely significant results. We argue that many of these nonfindings may be attributed to a neglect of group-specific differences in behavior. In this study, we examine how the association of unemployment and fertility varies by sociodemographic subgroups using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and from Danish population registers. We find that male unemployment is related to a postponement of first and second childbearing in both countries. The role of female unemployment is less clear at these two parities. Both male and female unemployment is positively correlated with third birth risks. More importantly, our results show that there are strong educational gradients in the unemployment and fertility nexus, and that the relationship between unemployment and fertility varies by socioeconomic group. Fertility tends to be lower during periods of unemployment among highly educated women and men, but not among their less educated counterparts.

In 2009, Norway and Sweden completed their process of granting same-sex couples the same rights to marriage as those granted to couples of opposite sexes. Following the introduction of a specific civil status for couples of the same sex, the registered partnership, in 1993 and 1995, both countries adopted fully gender-neutral marriage legislation in 2009. In the present article, we describe the road to gender-neutral marriage in Scandinavia and map out some of the demographic developments of same-sex partnerships and marriages. We demonstrate a recent switch to higher female than male same-sex union formation, and also a higher level of female than male same-sex marriage dissolution. These demographic patterns are similar across all countries of Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Previous analyses of period fertility suggest that the trends of the Nordic countries are sufficiently similar to speak of a common "Nordic fertility regime". We investigate whether this assumption can be corroborated by comparing cohort fertility patterns in the Nordic countries. We study cumulated and completed fertility of Nordic birth cohorts based on the childbearing histories of women born in 1935 and later derived from the population registers of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. We further explore childbearing behaviour by women’s educational attainment. The results show remarkable similarities in postponement and recuperation between the countries. Median childbearing age is about 2−3 years higher in the 1960−64 cohort than in the 1950−54 cohort, but the younger cohort recuperates the fertility level of the older cohort at ages 30 and above. A similar pattern of recuperation can be observed for highly educated women as compared to women with less education, resulting in small differences in completed fertility across educational groups. Another interesting finding is that of a positive relationship between educational level and the final number of children when women who become mothers at similar ages are compared. Despite some differences in the levels of childlessness, country differences in fertility outcome are generally small. The cohort analyses thus support the notion of a common Nordic fertility regime.

This article argues for a more careful consideration of theoretical and methodological aspects in studies of the effects of family policies on childbearing behavior. In our approach, we employ elements of comparative welfare-state research, of the sociology of “constructed categories”, and of “the new institutionalism” to demonstrate that investigations into policy effects need to contextualize policies and need to reduce their complexity by focusing on “critical junctures”, “space”, and “usage”. As regards methods we argue that the effects of policies can only be assessed properly if we study their impact on individual behavior, event-history models applied to individual-level data being the state-of-the-art of such an approach. We use selected empirical studies from Sweden to demonstrate that the type of approach that we advocate prevents us from drawing misleading conclusions.

Extending recent research on parental gender preferences in the Nordic countries, this study uses unique register data from Finland and Sweden (1971-1999) that provide us with the opportunity to compare childbearing dynamics and possible underlying sex preferences among native majorities and national minorities, namely Finnish-born immigrants in Sweden and members of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. For Finland, we observe a continuous boy preference among the national majority and the Swedish-speaking minority as reflected in higher third-birth rates of mothers of two girls than of mothers of two boys. Evidence of similar preferences is found for Finnish-born migrants in Sweden, where the native-born population instead appears to have developed a girl preference. In all cases, we also observe clear indications of a preference for having at least one child of each sex. Generally speaking, our findings support an interpretation of parental gender preferences as a longstanding cultural phenomenon, related to country of childhood socialization rather than language group. Moreover, an analysis of regional and educational differentials in child-sex specific fertility behavior in Sweden reveals no evidence which supports various diffusion theories of persistence and change in parents’ sex preferences for children.

This paper investigates the impact of labour-market attachment on first births of foreign-born women in Sweden. The study uses a longitudinal, register-based dataset consisting of the entire population of immigrants from ten nations and a five-per-cent random sample of natives. The effects of earned income are evident, with increased income levels increasing the probability of becoming a mother for all observed nationalities. The effects of various forms of participation and non-participation in the labour force do not vary greatly between immigrants and the Swedish-born. Among all subgroups, we find a higher propensity to begin childbearing among those who are established in the labour market. Contrary to popular belief, receiving welfare benefits clearly reduces first-birth intensity for immigrants but not for natives. The similarity in patterns across widely different national groups supports the notion that various institutional factors affecting all subgroups are crucial in influencing childbearing behaviour.

The present study provides an investigation of patterns in child¬bearing among foreign-born women in Sweden during the 1960s to 1990s. Event-history techniques are applied to longitudinal population-register data on childbearing and migration of 446.000 foreign-born women who had ever lived in Sweden before the end of 1999. Period trends in parity-specific fertility appear to be quite similar for Swedish- and foreign-born women but important differences exist in levels of childbearing propensities between women stemming from different countries. Most immigrant groups tend to display higher levels of childbearing shortly after immigration. We conclude that migration and family building in many cases are interrelated processes and that it is always important to account for time since migration when fertility of immigrants is studied.